All these services from Netflix to Uber are built on understandable foundations. They lose a ton of money in their first phase in order to gain subscribers but sooner or later start looking to turn profit out at least stop the bleeding.
I can already hear the outcry of surprised gamers when Microsoft cracks the whip on their Game Pass pricing, and there will be little to no alternative because they bought out most of the studios and publishers.
Well, if you linearly extrapolate from recent events, eventually they will have a single user who is paying a billion dollars a month for their subscription.
This shouldn’t really surprise anyone, the writers all finished striking for MORE MONEY. Services aren’t free, content isn’t free. Netflix hires a lot of writers and endless unionized people to make their shows and films. If we all want to be part of making society more equal it does infact come with higher costs for our selves, and I am perfectly fine with that.
In a new chart, which can be viewed below, the WGA estimated how that $343 million breaks down on a studio-by-studio basis. It estimates that the proposed contract would cost Disney an additional $75 million, or less than 0.1% of its $82 billion annual revenue. It also estimates that Netflix would pay up an additional $68 million, or 0.2% of its $31.6 billion annual revenue.
Oh ONLY 68 MILLION dollars, not to mention the ever increasing cost of living for all the other unionized cast and crew. I suppose they can totally just absorb those costs, or people should not get cost of living increases right… The company has a little over a 10% profit margin, which doesn’t seem egregious to me.
You really bought into the entire PR material here. What makes you think the extra profits are going to go to staff? That never happens. Instead it grows the company profits so the shareholders gets richer.
Every company, specially in the US, are keeping their salaries low so the company can make higher profits.
Netflix profits last year was 3.5 billion dollars, and that was one of the bad years.
Love the down votes haha… I guess people don’t want to actually pay for creators to make content. I don’t think the average person has any idea how much content creation costs, nor how time consuming it is.
Yeah doesnt surprise me that Netflix are digging for more pennies in the couch. buddy of mine actually decided to make a streaming service himself through Emby after the practices of the companies kept getting worse. Obligated to plug my buddy since hes a small independent hoster I helped troubleshoot for with a pretty damn good cross platform service Good Alternative Service: at $7.99 / month with 3000+ movies at 1080p WITH show requests… if you arent gonna pirate theres really no contest here. popflix.cc discord.gg/UeSPqCpdAy
Cable is a pipe to get content from TV and Film companies into the home. Netflix was also a pipe to get content from TV and Film companies into the home. The cost of TV and Film isn’t magically cheaper on cable or Netflix. TV and Film companies want to get paid, and that cost gets passed on in the subscription cost. Instead of cable being a one stop shop for bundles and packages of everything, you now have to basically have multiple streaming subs that likely add up to the cost of cable.
It’s the reality of the economics of TV. “TV” is “TV” regardless of whether you get it from streaming or cable. And that means the consumer cost is largely going to be the same. Back when everyone had cable, streaming was probably cheap for 2 reasons:
Subscriber acquisition practices to grow the streaming subscriber base kept cost down even if margins were low.
Streaming was the icing on the cake. So TV companies were happy to make content cheap for streaming when Cable was the main cash cow.
Depends on if it coincides with raises for working class staff, or there was enough transparency in operating costs and expenditures to be confident it’s not just being done for additional profit margins. If the cost of serving video has actually gone up by $2 * subscription count every month, then no problem. I suspect that isn’t the case, though.
I’ve been a Netflix customer for over 20 years. The recent password crackdown and constant price gouging led me to cancel their service yesterday. Yo Ho MF’ers.
the capitalists are unable to understand that the “eternal growth” their books mention is not feasible in real world and in fact it is a bug. There are physical upper limits that cannot be overcome. There will not be unlimited people that will always enrol in a new subscription. They need to somehow understand that at some point a company may reach their ceiling. This is not reason to do whatever panic change in order to show growth in the numbers. It will just not happen.
Ah but when the prices can’t go any higher they can always remove content, paying their suppliers less and getting cheaper hardware. I wish I was joking but these are the options that are left.
The thing is, they do know this. They are perfectly willing to drive a company into the ground on the promise of annual growth, and they’ll dump it the moment it cannot serve them monetarily.
Sounds like Netflix is panicking and scrambling. The frequency of their subscription hikes increases and increases. Perhaps they think they can price hike their way out of the dissatisfaction they have delivered to subscribers. Keep trying Netflix, find that magic subscription price point that will surely cover for all the subscribers you’re shedding with your idiocy and will definitely not hasten your arrival to 0% revenue. Increasing that price won’t lose you more subscribers right? Of course not. Burn Netflix burn.
They’re finding the optimal price point. Each time they raise they lose some customers, but their increased revenue leads them to being more profitable afterwards. Eventually the price increases will result in so many people leaving that they’ll have to stop.
Problem is, this strategy has exactly one direction: irrelevance. It can take a very long time to get there, but eventually you lose so many subscribers that your competitors have begun eating your lunch. The profits were solid so you didn’t care. It’s the normal business life cycle, and Netflix is well into the mature phase. We have worse quality and higher prices to look forward to.
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